Forget About Income Inequality: Bloomberg

Don’t touch the wealth of the wealthy. We hear that message, dozens of times each month, disguised in various ways by the Corporate media. We hear it despite the fact that wealth inequality has reached a greater extreme in our societies than at any time since the last revolutionary cycle, nearly three hundred years ago. The Top 0.1% now hoard as much wealth as the bottom-90% combined.

However, few of these don’t-touch-our-wealth messages have been as obvious or insipid as Bloomberg’s latest effort. The latest brainwashing is couched in the loftiest of headlines:

The Wisdom to Know Which Causes of Inequality Can Be Changed

Ironically, the article itself points out one of the primary reasons why income/wealth inequality continues to worsen in our societies, despite reaching historic extremes:

Yet even income inequality turns out to be surprisingly ill-defined. It is a melting pot into which we throw wealth inequality, wage inequality, inequality of opportunity, inequality of political power, and often rigidity of socioeconomic class.

Yes, whoever should be explaining and defining “income inequality” to the masses as it reaches the worst extremes in history has been doing a terrible job. Oh wait, that would be the mainstream media – entities like Bloomberg. After Bloomberg accidentally points out its own deliberate failure to explain/define the heinous economic injustice which exists in our societies, we get the feigned concern about this injustice.

Yet no matter how hard we stir, these things cannot all be made into a single issue called “inequality.” They do not arise from the same sources, nor would they be eliminated by the same solutions. Fixing one will not necessarily fix another, and there is no comprehensive solution that will fix them all.

Sadly (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), we cannot fix all of these heinous injustices, so we need to have the “wisdom” to know which of these problems we should even attempt to solve, and which we should just continue to ignore, presumably forever. At this point we immediately get to the hard-core propaganda.

So which ones should we try to fix, and how?

I would cross income equality itself off of the list of priorities.  [emphasis mine]

Spoken like a true prostitute for the (very) Rich. So how does this prostitute defend her don’t-touch-the-wealth-of-the-wealthy rhetoric? Through more feigned empathy.

Far greater concerns include: absolute suffering among those with low incomes; socioeconomic structure that seems to be ossifying into a hierarchy of professional classes; and a decline in income mobility.

Forget about the monstrous hoards of wealth in the hands of a few, which continue to grow larger and larger. Instead, let’s focus our energies on “helping the Poor.”

Yes, let’s forget about dealing with a gigantic injustice, which can be immediately addressed, quickly and easily. Instead, let’s focus all our energies and attention on an issue where nothing is ever done, and nothing ever changes: helping the poor.

A tiny, micro-sliver of our population is hoarding roughly half of all the wealth of Western societies. Did this 1/1000^th of the population earn as much wealth as the bottom-90%, combined. No, obviously they stole it. A massive hoard of stolen wealth sits right in front of us. And it requires only a single word to liberate some/most/all of that stolen wealth, and return it to its victims: “taxation.”

Correcting wealth inequality (the real issue here) is the simplest of all problems to fix: tax the stolen wealth, which was created, in large part, through inequitable taxation. Conversely, alleviating worsening poverty is a very complex subject – a subject which we never even begin to address.

Why not? Because the moment any well-meaning politician (there are still a few) suggests helping the poor, the so-called “fiscal conservatives” immediately chant their favorite refrain: “we can’t afford to help the poor.”

Why not? Why “can’t we afford” to help the poor, with poverty in our societies also at an all-time extreme? We can’t afford to help to help the poor, because a tiny gang of Thieves has stolen-and-hoarded half of all our wealth.

Could we “afford” to help the poor if we liberated all of that stolen wealth? Yes. Could we begin to repair our decaying infrastructure if we liberated that stolen wealth? Yes. And with all those extra tax revenues, our governments could still run budget surpluses, and stop sinking further and further into debt.

Addressing “income equality” (wealth inequality) is the easiest of all socioeconomic problems to address, and (surprise! surprise!) once we liberated that stolen wealth, all of our other social and economic issues immediately become much easier to fix as well. So why shouldn’t we attempt to deal with this large, easy, obvious problem, when addressing this one issue would yield numerous dividends? The Bloomberg shill offers a feeble defense.

The government is very good at taxing the income of some Americans and writing cheques to others. (Whether you think it should do this is, of course, a different question.)

This is such a twisted piece of rhetoric that it requires explicit translation. In the past, when our governments have “taxed” some of us (i.e. the bottom-90%) and “written cheques” to others (i.e. the Top 0.1%), they have done a very, very bad job. They have done such a bad job that wealth is now more inequitably/unjustly distributed through our societies than at any time in our history.

So, after this manifestly inequitable transfer of wealth into the hands of the Top 0.1%, our governments should never again attempt any wealth redistribution (i.e. liberating that stolen wealth). We should simply leave half of all our wealth in the hands of the Thieves. Forever.

This is obviously a very, very convenient position to take, if you’re one of the Thieves (or one of their paid lackeys). It doesn’t sound nearly as convincing if you’re part of the bottom-90% who have been systematically robbed.

Of course, one fiction remains in the preceding analysis. What is implied by the Bloomberg article, and often flatly stated by the Corporate media is that this monstrous wealth inequality was/is somehow an “accident”, created through the incompetence of otherwise well-meaning regimes.

As is well-known to regular readers, nothing could be further from the truth. Our governments didn’t do a “bad job” in facilitating the transfer (theft) of half of all our wealth, into the pockets of a tiny group of Thieves. They did a very, very good job, since this is precisely what these traitorous regimes intended – on behalf of their real Masters.

Our economies have been bankrupted. Our societies teeter on collapse. This is all due to the massive, systemic pillaging of our wealth, primarily via a single crime syndicate, owned/controlled by these ultra-wealthy oligarchs. Not surprisingly, the same oligarchs who dictate to our governments also control the Corporate media. Indeed, they own the tiny handful of companies which now totally control almost all of what we see/hear.

This propaganda monolith has one, overriding message. Because it wants to make sure we understand this message, it is repeated again and again.

We are never going to recover the countless $trillions in wealth that have been stolen from us. It’s foolish for us to even talk about such things. We should have the “wisdom” to know better.